Hi All,
At 08:14 AM 5/10/00 -0500, you wrote:
>While I think 100 percent accessibility is a noble goal, realistically, what
>kind of expectations can we have about PDF technology?
It is not a noble goal. Soon for the federal government it will be the law
so Adobe better either figure it out or make the information available in a
medium that is 100 percent accessible. This idea that just trying and
doing the noble thing for accessibility has to stop and ensuring
accessibility from the beginning has to start. Adobe never did that and
now they are just prattling on and on about how they are working hard to
help the disabled when it is they who created the barrier in the first place.
Realistically I don't expect much better than the nonsense output we
currently get from Adobe. They might do some slick parlor tricks and get
the PDF conversion routines to interact better with screen readers
automatically but the fundamental conversions will still be filled with
text that's formatted so crazily that much of it is impossible to use.
Adobe says they'll be creating authoring tools to help address this problem
by allowing people to indicate more about a document's structure. If you
think convincing the bulk of the internet community that adding alt-tags
matters, well wait until you try and convince them to add structural
information to their documents.